Lamorna Ash began to research her second book, an account of the religious beliefs and experiences of some contemporary Christians in the UK, in 2021. She was 26 years old. She was “no Christian, no theologian, no philosopher”. She was a freelance journalist and the author of a well-received first book (Dark, Salt, Clear: Life in a Cornish Fishing Village, 2020). She lived in north London and “knew that miracles and religious experiences were not real”, that “churches were as useless and beautiful as dinosaur bones” and that “the end of life was synonymous with finality”.
She was, in other words, a reflexive secular humanist, as most of us are, most of the time, in the 21st-century West. The project that became Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever began with simple journalistic curiosity (or with the need to have a piece to write – often the same thing). Two university friends of hers, formerly comedians, had converted to Christianity and were training to become Anglican priests. Ash had the notion that an article about these friends might reveal something interesting about her generation and its relationship with religious faith.
As, indeed, it does. Why might it be weird, in the 21st century, for two young western men to become Anglican priests? And it is weird – or so we feel. Mainstream culture, so-called, looks steadfastly away from religious belief; to be an avowed believer in Christ, in a contemporary liberal society, is to live beyond the pale.
But as Karen Armstrong points out in A History of God (1993), it is not secularism but religious faith that is natural to human beings. Armstrong writes: “Men and women started to worship gods as soon as they became recognisably human.” She points out that “our current secularism is an entirely new experiment, unprecedented in human history”. (She adds, drily: “We have yet to see how it will work.”)
Beginning around the end of the 18th century (I generalise hugely, but time is short), the rationalist strain of Protestantism began to turn on faith itself, in a process or series of processes known retrospectively as the Enlightenment. These processes led both to new forms of economic, political and social organisation and to a crisis of meaning that haunts us still.
The root of this crisis was summed up by Nietzsche in 1882: “belief in the Christian God has become unbelievable”. Or, more pithily: “God is dead”. Without God, whither meaning? Whither consolation and community? Whither the significance of the transient individual life?
In the third decade of the 21st century (the age of climate change and of the bitter end of the neoliberal experiment), this crisis feels freshly acute. Our sense of the future has collapsed. At such moments, secularism’s failure to supply people’s lives with positive meaning becomes painfully visible. It is not surprising that at a time like this, people should turn to older sources of meaning.
Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever is therefore a book for our moment. Its great strength lies not in its certainties but in its uncertainties, in its powerful sense of ambivalence. A book about the mysteries of faith by a convinced atheist might have its value; a book about the mysteries of faith by a full-throated believer has its value for the faithful.
But what we’ve got here is far more interesting. Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever is a book about the mysteries of faith by someone who isn’t sure if she believes or not; someone who understands the profound allure of religion and who is at the same time deeply uneasy about its potential for error, corruption, oppression; someone who knows that beneath the “hard shell” of the word “belief” is a truer meaning: “‘I want to believe,’ or ‘I need to believe,’ or ‘I rely on believing.’”
That Ash begins her book by recounting stories of conversion to Christianity – Saul on the road to Damascus; St Augustine under the fig tree – would seem to tell us that her book is itself a kind of conversion story. And this turns out to be true, in a way. The conversion story has a specific purpose – it is designed to lead people to seek out or expect similar experiences.
But Ash understands that the conversion story is also always a metaphor for any great inner change. Her book, recounting her own inner change, offers another such metaphor. It is an intelligent and sophisticated literary performance, subtle, self-conscious and beautifully wrought.
Ash‘s investigations into contemporary Christianity in Britain were not, she tells us, “borne out of any kind of spiritual deficiency or want […] not that my life was without such sinkholes; I just had my own prophylactics going.” Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever weaves its way delicately between accounts of Ash‘s personal experiences and her research for the book – she attends an Evangelical Bible study course; she parties till dawn with her friends; she spends time living with other members of Youth With A Mission, a Christian community; she visits the abbey on Iona; she engages in a silent retreat.
Over and over again she hears a version of the same story: a person enduring great suffering or bewilderment is rescued, to a greater or lesser degree, by faith. Ash‘s own sexuality makes her a sharp critic of the conservative political views that she encounters. But she is a deeply empathetic reporter of the stories that people confide in her. There is no mockery here. There is a great deal of beauty.
Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever is less a book about Christianity than it is a book about ambivalence, about “aporias” (a word Ash uses several times). In going deliberately against the grain of the belief it hungers to experience, the book finds nuanced ways of imagining a Christianity that can be, must be, remade in an unceasing process, to keep it usable by actual human beings in the contemporary world.
It is a literary performance of a high order; it is also a deeply humane book. Through its humanity, it attempts to rescue what is valuable in Christianity – that most human of ideas.
Kevin Power is Associate Professor of Literary Practice in the School of English, Trinity College Dublin
